Paul Bunyan
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- For other uses see Paul Bunyan (disambiguation).
Image:Paul Bunyan and Babe statues Bemidji Minnesota crop.JPG Paul Bunyan is a mythical lumberjack in tall tales. French Canadians gave birth to the tales during the Papineau Rebellion of 1837, when they revolted against the young English Queen. This would probably explain the origin of Bunyan's last name since "Bonyenne" is a colloquial French-Canadian expression of surprise and astonishment meaning "Good Grief" or "My Goodness".
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Voyageur origins
The traditional English-French cultural border of 19th century Canada was the Ottawa River, main highway for the forestry industry and a centuries-old way of penetrating the immense interior of the continent, since the days of the voyageurs and fur-traders of New France.
The origin of the legends hold that at the mouth of the river in the Two Mountains area near Saint-Eustache, Québec, loggers stormed into battle against the British, among them a fierce and bearded giant named Paul Bonjean, monikered as "Bonyenne". (Another series of related legends are based on the feats of an actual man having lived in logging camps in the Ottawa Valley named Big Joe Mufferaw or Jos. Montferrand.) Defender of the people, the popular hero's legends moved up-river from shanty ("chantier" in French) to shanty. His name was anglified and stories were eventually modified and added upon from storyteller to storyteller.
Crossing the Sault-Ste-Marie river in northern Michigan, American loggers gave him Babe, the ox, and the mythical logging camp. By 1860, Paul Bunyan had become an American legendary hero, on the scale of Hercules or Asterix.
Ironically, although the Paul Bunyan legend is that of a giant, it can be somewhat related to the tales of "Ti-Jean" or "Little-John" the trickster which were part of New-France and Louisiana folklore since the mid-1600's and have thrived in fur-trading outposts such as Michillimacinac, Sault-Ste-Marie, Fort Pontchartrain (Detroit) and logging camp oral tradition all over northern Ontario, Michigan and Minnesota and the Great Lakes and Mississippi watershed.
Studies have shown that these old European trickster myths may have been fused with Native American folklore and may also have inspired the creation of yet another profoundly American character, Bugs Bunny.
Lumberjack legends
A lumberjack of huge size and strength, Paul Bunyan has become a folkloric character in the American psyche. It is said that he and his blue ox, Babe, were so large their footsteps created Minnesota's ten thousand lakes. Babe measured 42 axe handles and a plug of chewing tobacco between his horns. He was found during the winter of the blue snow; his mate was Bessie, the Yaller Cow.
Like many myths, this explains a physical phenomenon. Bunyan's birth was strange, as are the births of many mythic heroes, as it took seventeen storks to carry the infant (ordinarily, one stork could carry several babies and drop them off at their parents' home). Paul and Babe dug the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe behind him, and created Mount Hood by piling rocks on top of their campfire to put it out.
He is a classic American "big man" who was popular in 19th century America as an exemplar of a minority group, much as in French-Canadian lore. Further, the Bunyan myths sprang from lumber camp tales, bawdy to put it mildly. In one such tale, extreme cold forced bears to look for food; one wandered into a lumber camp. It chased the lumberjacks up a tree on which they had a ladder. To keep the bear from climbing after them (despite the fact bears do not need ladders to climb trees), they kicked down the ladder. This saved them from the bear, but trapped them in the tree. To escape, the lumberjacks urinated in unison and created a frozen pole, which they slid down. Such tall tales, though later toned down, were attributed to a single character, Bunyan, and became the stories we know today.
Newspaper legends
The popularization of the myth of Paul Bunyan can be traced back to James MacGillivray, an itinerant newspaper reporter who wrote the first Paul Bunyan article for the Oscoda (MI) News in 1906 and an expanded version of the same article for the Detroit News. He collected the stories from actual lumberjacks, and began disseminating the legend with the July 24, 1910 printing of The Round River Drive which included the following, concerning Dutch Jake (another mythical lumberjack of great strength) and the narrator participating in a Bunyan-sponsored contest to cut down the biggest tree in the forest.
- "Dutch Jake and me had picked out the biggest tree we could find on the forty, and we'd put three days on the cut with our big saw, what was three crosscuts brazed together, making 30 feet of teeth. We was getting along fine on the fourth day when lunchtime comes, and we thought we'd best get to the sunny side to eat. So we grabs our grub and starts around that tree.
- 'We hadn't gone far when we heard a noise. Blamed if there wasn't Bill Carter and Sailor Jack sawin' at the same tree. It looked like a fight at first, but we compromised, meetin' each other at the heart on the seventh day. They'd hacked her to fall to the north, and we'd hacked her to fall to the south, and there that blamed tree stood for a month or more, clean sawed through, but not knowin' which way to drop 'til a windstorm came along and throwed her over."
Statues of both Bunyan and Babe exist in Bemidji, Minnesota, Westwood, California, Del Norte County, California, and in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Statues of Bunyan exist in Akeley, Minnesota, Bangor, Maine; Ossineke, Michigan; Brainerd, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; St. Maries, Idaho; and Shelton, Washington. Bunyan is depicted on the world's largest wood carving, at the entrance to Sequoia National Park in California. There is a group called the Mystic Knights of the Blue Ox in Bayfield, Wisconsin.
Paul Bunyan has dozens of towns vying for being considered his home: the above mentioned Bemidji, Brainerd, Shelton, and Westwood; and Bay City, Michigan, where several authors, including James Stevens and D. Laurence Rogers, have traced the tales to the exploits of French Canadian lumberjack Fabian "Saginaw Joe" Fournier, 1845-1875. Fournier worked for the H.M. Loud Company in the Grayling, MI, area, 1865-1875, where MacGillivray later worked and apparently picked up the stories.
Recent fiction
Paul Bunyan makes an appearance in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. He is the subject of a poem by Robert Frost called "Paul's Wife", found in New Hampshire
See also
Other Big Men
- Big Joe Mufferaw a.k.a. Jos. Montferrand of the Ottawa Valley
- Gargantua
- Pecos Bill
- Iron John of Michigan
- John Henry
- Mike Fink
- Hiawatha
- Jack Magyar
- Fionn mac Cumhail
External links
- Paul Bunyan Catalog. Roadside America. Roadside statues and other tributes to the Great Tree-Biter, Paul Bunyan
- The Story of Paul Bunyan
- The Paul Bunyan Logging Camp Museum and re-created logging camp.
- Folklore History of the Paul Bunyan Legend Paul Bunyan: How A Terrible Timber Feller Became A Legend, book tracing the origin and how the Paul Bunyan legends were created
- The Straight Dope: Is Paul Bunyan a fraud? Describes the links between the Bunyan legend and the Red River Lumber Company.
- Paul Bunyan, Modern-Day Sex Symbol
References
Gartenberg, Max. "Paul Bunyan and Little John", Journal of American Folklore, volume 62, 1949.
Maltin, Leonard, "Of Mice and Magic - the History of American Animation", Plume Books, Revised edition, May, 1990
Bélanger, Georges, "La collection Les Vieux m'ont conté du père Germain Lemieux, s.j." Francophonies d'Amérique, Ottawa. Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa, no. 1, 1991, pages 35-42
Germain, Georges-Hébert, "Adventurers in the New World: The Saga of the Coureurs des Bois", Libre-Expression, Montréal, 2003